


Shining as Sunrise

by Carmarthen



Category: Mark of the Horse Lord - Rosemary Sutcliff
Genre: Birth, Canon Era, F/M, Family, Friendship, Gen, Grief, Identity, M/M, Motherhood, Politics, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-03
Updated: 2012-08-03
Packaged: 2017-11-11 08:04:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/476376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carmarthen/pseuds/Carmarthen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For Murna, it had been as if she expected to take up an ill-balanced blade that had once slipped and cut her, and found instead a bright and shining dirk that fit her hand as if made for it.</p><p>Murna and Conory pick up the pieces, after the events of the book.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shining as Sunrise

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Isis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Isis/gifts).
  * Inspired by [The Balance of the Blade](https://archiveofourown.org/works/478525) by [Isis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Isis/pseuds/Isis). 



> Thank you for making Swap happen, Isis! Seriously, you kicked me in the butt until I stopped talking and started doing, and I'm so glad. This exchange would not have run so smoothly (or at all) without you, and you did so much to make my first time moderating an exchange awesome and relatively unstressful.
> 
> Many thanks to bunn and athousandwinds for betaing.
> 
> I grant permission for others to make any type of fanwork based on this work for any reason, especially if it's Murna/Fionhula.

It was a hard birth, and a long one, and in the throes of the worst pain Murna found it little comfort when brusque Grania beside her said, "Take heart, my Queen, a hard labor means a strong son."

She drifted in a haze of pain afterwards, dimly aware that she was still bleeding from her womb, and that her women were working in quiet urgency around her, shifting her carefully in the bed and pressing cloths against her, trying to stop the blood. Her friend Fionhula was stroking her sweat-damp forehead with a cool cloth and murmuring something kind that Murna could not quite hear. Someone pressed a cup to her lips and made her drink a bitter earthy tea. "The babe--"

"Is a fine strong boy," said Grania firmly. "You must lie still."

And then it was dark, and she was floating on waves of warmth, the pain receding to a dull ache.

She woke to the feel of something small and soft as a hound puppy curled against her in the flickering torchlit dimness of the Queen’s Place. It was the babe, cleaned and swaddled and snuffling in his sleep, and even in her weariness Murna felt a rush of fierce knife-edged love for him that surprised her in its keenness. She had thought, before, that love for a child would be a comfortable thing, but it was not; this tiny creature was so fragile, and already fear and awe mingled with the love. She would not see his father again until it was her time to go West of the sunset, but she had her son now--her son who would be Horse Lord in his time, but also her son who was a child of the Earth as well as the Sun.

Someone drew open open the door and stood for a moment with the leaping golden fire behind him, and outside Murna could hear as if from a great distance the sounds of singing and rejoicing. But the sound seemed so far away, and the dark figure in the doorway so still, that her heart clenched with a sudden chill; and it was in her mind that this was her gladiator, come to to take her and the babe away to Antumnos. 

Murna did not know whether to rise and go to him with rejoicing, holding out their child for him to kiss, or shrink away in fear. For she realized then that she was not ready to die, although her heart still ached and she turned every day to tell her thoughts to her husband, only to check at finding empty air. She was not ready to die, and she would not let the babe die either, if there was power in her to prevent it.

All this passed through her thoughts in the span of time between the opening of the door, and the figure saying softly, "Murna, my kinswoman, are you awake?"

And Murna blinked, feeling foolish. Of course it was Conory, who had been always by her side after he brought the news. How could she have thought him to be her husband, with his slight, narrow-waisted figure and the firelight glinting off the crystal drops in his ears, and the striped shadow of the wildcat draped around his shoulders like a collar? She scrubbed at her eyes with one hand.

"I am awake," she said, cuddling the babe closer.

Across the room, little dark Fionhula stirred. "The Queen is tired from the birthing," she said, not at all abashed at Conory's presence, and Murna loved her for that. Fionhula had always been a fiercely loyal friend to her, even when Murna dared not allow herself to be friend to anyone. And now, now that her husband had broken down the walls around her heart and then been taken from her as swiftly as he came, she needed friendship more than she could have imagined before.

But there were things she wished to speak of to Conory now that the babe was born, words that were not for other ears, not even Fionhula's. "It's all right, Fionhula," she said, and then had to take a moment to breathe and push back the pain, for under the bandages she throbbed with a heavy, deep pain. "I wish to speak to my kinsman for a little while. Go you and ask Grania to bring more herbs for the pain."

"Are you very hurt?" Conory asked, when Fionhula had ducked out of the house with a none-too-friendly look for him. Conory sounded wary, and a little awkward; for all the ways he was not quite as other men, this was a woman's mystery, and he knew nothing of it.

"I am alive, and so I expect it is not so bad," Murna said, "but it was not an easy birth."

"And the babe?"

He had not stepped all the way into the house, but merely stood aside for Fionhula to pass and then gone back to stand in the doorway with the fire behind him, so Murna could not see his face, but only the shine of the wildcat’s eyes in the dimness.

"You have a strong cousin. Will you come over here and hold him?"

Conory coaxed Shân the wildcat off his shoulders to crouch in the bracken on the floor and came over to the bed-place, where she held up the babe to him. "Such a small thing, to be Lord of the Dalriadain," said Conory, but he held Murna's son as gently any mother could wish. The babe stirred and wriggled. “His eyes are blue.”

“They will likely darken as he grows older.”

He stood there a while longer, gazing down at the babe, and then lifted his hand so the babe could grasp his thumb. "I swore to your husband that I would protect you and the boy, swore it in blood. It is in my mind that it may not be so easy a task, in time.”

That she had not known. The aid of an unmarried kinsman with no sons of his own was one thing, but for Conory to swear a binding oath, when he might one day have his own sons of the Royal Blood--that was another thing, and words seemed too light and easily given to thank him for it. “I did not know.”

Then the babe began to sniffle, little gulping sobs that would soon turn into a wail, and Conory handed him back in haste, as if he might bite. Murna stifled a laugh; he was so much a man in some ways, for all his beaded bracelets and graceful ways, and he had not spent half his life holding other people’s children whether he wanted to or no.

After she had soothed the babe back to sleep, she said, “When he fought for the Red Crests' amusement, what name did my husband answer to?"

Conory went still for a moment, and beside him Shân stiffened and stared, until he reached down absently to gentle her silken ears. So he truly did know.

She had known in some way, almost from the first, that her husband was not Midir, just as she would have known if she took up another woman's dirk in the war dance. But for her, it had been as if she expected to take up an ill-balanced blade that had once slipped and cut her, and found instead a dirk bright and keen and shining as sunrise.

When Conory had brought the news, he had said, _The grief is on me, Murna my kinswoman, that I must tell you your husband has gone West of the sunset._ And then he had paused, and his voice had cracked a little, and said _Midir is dead._

And she had been certain, then, that Conory spoke of two men. He had not called her husband Midir since, not to her.

"In the arena," Conory said, carefully, "your husband was called Red Phaedrus."

"Phaedrus," she said, and the sounds felt unfamiliar on her tongue, as unfamiliar as she had found Midir when he returned. "Does it have a meaning, in the language of the Red Crests?"

"It means _bright_ ," said Conory.

"It is a good name for a Horse Lord of the Dalriadain." She looked down at the babe, at his little crumpled face and the scruff of red hair that no doubt would fall out soon enough. "I will name him Belin, then, for his father."

"May he be his father's son." Conory's voice was soft, and he reached out and gently cupped the babe's head for a moment.

"You loved him," Murna said, before she could think to keep the words back. She felt no jealousy; it seemed only right that Conory should have loved him, her gladiator. He had been worthy of love, and whatever Conory had had of him, he had taken nothing from her by it.

She half-expected Conory to say something about brothers, to turn her question aside, but Conory looked up at her, something raw and grieving in his face. "Na," he said, "na, not--like that. Not as I loved--I might have, in time, were his heart not given elsewhere. But he was my heart-friend, my shoulder companion, and that was more than enough."

Before Murna could say anything, Fionhula had opened the door into the Queen's Place, bringing with her Grania and the scent of smoke from the fire outside. "She must rest," Grania said to Conory, rather sharply, with her hands on her hips and her head up, for all the world as if she were a queen herself. "Are you a healer, to be standing about the Queen's Place tiring the Queen with speech when she is not yet risen from childbed?"

"I beg your leave," said Conory, and Murna hoped Grania did not hear the laughter in his voice. She was certain Fionhula did. "I only came to pay my kinswoman--and my new cousin--my respects, and see that all is well with them."

"All is well," said Murna.

"Then I bid you good rest."

"The grief is on me that Midir is dead," said Murna, impulsively, and she did feel grief for Conory's sake, although not her own. They had both lost a part of their hearts, but for Conory, she thought, the wound was older and had only been half-healed all these years, to be torn open again somehow. One did not have to die to be lost.

"It is also on me." Conory checked in the doorway and ducked his head; she could not see his face well in the firelight, but his eyes caught the light like a cat's, and on his shoulder Shân's eyes flamed like emeralds. "Belin is a good name for the babe. I mind he will be a light-bringer for the Dalriadain, someday."

Aye, someday, for Murna and Conory and all who stood with them would shed their own heart’s blood to keep him safe. But tonight, he was only her son, small and soft and still smelling of the herbs the women had used to wash him. After Grania had checked her bandages and given her more bitter tea to drink and left again, Murna began to sing quietly to the babe. It was a cradle-song so old that she only half understood the words; after a moment Fionhula's sweet husky voice like wild honey joined hers, and it began to sound something like a lament.

**Author's Note:**

> As I wrote this story, a number of things percolated into it more or less subconsciously from Isis's [The Balance of the Blade](http://archiveofourown.org/works/478525), which I had beta'd, most especially the theme of the balance of the blade being different for Murna, too. She is, after all, also a warrior, and I think it was fairly likely by the end of the book that she had in fact figured out that her husband was not really Midir.
> 
> Murna and Conory are two of my favorite Sutcliff characters, Murna especially, and it was a pleasure to explore their relationship a little bit post-canon.
> 
> Fionhula has no name in canon (I borrowed one from _The Eagle of the Ninth_ ); she's the fierce, dark girl Murna does the war dance with.


End file.
